Guild Wars

I woke up at 10:00 a.m. on Monday (it’s the time between the end of the spring semester and the summer semester so I can afford to sleep in) take a shower, make some coffee and check my e-mail. As usual I see several messages from MMORPG.com telling me about some promo some game that I am following has, or the recent screen shots and so on of another game. But this time I see a message telling me about the Guild Wars E3 promo! I think to myself, “This can’t be more then another lore update or possibly video.” Man was I way off on both accounts! It was a free Alpha version of the game available for four days, yes four whole days! This was actually quite exciting.

So I click on the link and proceed to follow the directions, specify the drive I want this…unknown to reside on and begin the download. It takes something like 2-5 minutes for me to download the client. 2-5 minutes?! This can’t be possible! Any Alpha that has such a short download must be onto something. I then install the game, provide a valid e-mail and wham I’m off into the exciting world of Guild Wars…or was it?

The next screen asks me to choose a profession. So I choose a Necromancer because hey Necromancers tend to have pets and I love using pets for my dirty work. I then choose an Elementalist for my secondary profession because I want to nuke the NPC’s when my pets are taking the brunt of the damage. However, I later to find out that Necromancer’s don’t have pets. But this is only Alpha and the months to follow promise new features. Anyway, back to topic. I then choose from a rather limited, but still existent, array of faces, hair, hair color and then skin color. I’m not really one who cares much about customization so I wasn’t terribly put-off by the selection.

I then take my “customized” character and embark to the great unknown. When I join this new and unknown world I am quickly confronted with this group of NPC’s. I notice that one is larger than the others and assume this is the leader of the group. So naturally I take out the strongest one first and quickly clean up the others. Life Siphon (not sure this is the spell name) is very useful as you will see later in my post. I then see some activity in front of me. This is the Captain something-or-other chasing some rogue something-or-others and eventually killing one of them. He then asks me to assist him in his revenge and of course being the person I am I graciously accept.

I then proceed to the area where they ran to and make relatively quick work of them. Again, I used the same general tactics as I did before. Eventually I clear out that area, take some more quests and proceed to accomplish them. I soon find out that the glowing (rather Diablo II like) NPC’s have special little goodies for me to sell/use. So I make it my own personal quest to leave to solo area, re-enter the solo area and kill the same monsters again for different Gems. I know that the Gem Trader offers some rather nice prices for these and I quickly and quite greedily make roughly 1k gold. But this character is beginning to bore me and I choose a Warrior/Monk. It was really a quite obvious choice and it was apparently quite obvious to several others because it seems like every third person was a Warrior/Monk.

Anyway, I then proceed with the same quests and Gem hording as my Necromancer/Elementalist and quickly earn 1k gold as well. Again, I become isolated and bored with the solo area and decide I should try my hand in some quests. I quickly join the first invite and I am on my way. Since these people are unknown to me and I myself am learning the game the NPC’s make relatively quick work of us. They of course aggro the Monk/Elementalists/Rogues first (these NPC’s are relatively smart when it comes to isolating the lame animal) and pick them off while we attempt to kill them with our “n00b” weapons. Our group is immediately disbanded after this first debacle and I join another group. Luckily we have some people who have done this quest several times and have a strategy and we thankfully had a more balanced group. We get through this quest with some but not unexpected trouble and move on.

Now we are all in uncharted territory and no one knows what to do. Well…this outing lasted even shorten then the previous. We were simply murdered and it hurt; man did it hurt. So I decide that I had had enough of this and deicide to do some PvP. Hot damn this was the best decision I ever made! It was simply amazing! We had four apposing, though unknown players facing each other and trying to simply massacre them. So I did this for a few hours, switching between PvP and questing. Trying new combinations on other players and discovering what worked and what didn’t and WHY it didn’t work. Well now I am getting tired and decide some sleep will do some good.

I wake up the next morning with some new strategies planned and thought out only to find that over the last seven hours while I was asleep the whole PvP had changed! The old strategies I had no longer worked because people had earned new skills. Well this was an unpleasant surprise. So I now decide that I must quest for the rest of the day, earn skill points, learn some new skills and hopefully find better swords and shield. I eventually salvage enough Iron Ore to make a new sword and go out into the great unknown world of PvP and try my new talents. Well I had mixed results but most of my matches ended with my death and a quick boot to the Arena districts. Suffice to say the rest of my two days was experimenting with new variations, improving my Warrior/Monk and finishing quests with a slight diversion into PvP and the Fort PvP.

However, the game was not perfect which is to be expected considering it is still in Alpha. Taking this into consideration I want to make a little whish list with things I hope Guild Wars will work on as well as some things I absolutely loved.

Wish List:

 

* More balancing between the classes. I know this is Alpha but in PvP a Necromancer shouldn’t hit you with Life Siphon then proceed to hit you with Rotting Flesh and remove half your health before you can even think to use the Cure State (the Monk spell) to remove all negative effects. The same could be said for Rogues. They could cast the spell that reduces down time on spell regeneration and then proceed to use the same spell over and over, essentially shooting as fast as a click of the mouse.

 

*Loot drops need to be increased. There simply wasn’t enough loot to go around.

 

*More quests. Again I understand this is Alpha but I just hope you plan on adding more.

 

*More emotes. Laughing, jumping, cheering, roaring, sighing and pondering got old fast.

 

*Perhaps some voice macros that say something to the effect of, “Attack their healer!” or, “Protect our healer.” Maybe even the ability to make text hot keys?!

 

*The ability to choose your party members for PvP. You could do this in the grave yard but no where else. I heard some self professed “true Alpha” testers say that you were going to include this for the small 4v4 PvP but how do I know who they were?

 

*Perhaps the Gem Trader will accept Gems more often. I don’t know how many times I just gave away those Gems because the trader wouldn’t take them.

 

*Make money worth something. Getting 76 gold coins for selling a Gem and then turning around and buying a sword attack that does 3x damage for 97 isn’t quite right.

 

*A chest to store items. My inventory filled up quite fast. Some things I needed to hold onto, like armor and loot while others I didn't need on me, such as crafting materials and gems.

 

Again, I know this is still Alpha which is why these items are in my “Wish List” and not my “Why isn’t this done” list.

Things I Loved:

 

*PvP! It was simply amazing. The tactics required in combat were really quite demanding. “Attack their healer but make sure you have a way to slow them down so they don’t just keep running.” “Attack their healer but make sure you can remove the rotting flesh when they hit you with it.” You really had to make your role defined and hope other people’s roles complimented yours. There was a great deal of “what if” going on in my head.

 

*NPC’s! I loved how they would attack the weaker person first. It almost never failed that they would skirt the Warrior/Whatever and attack the Monk or Elementalist. It really required a great deal of coordination with the team.

 

*The simple crafting/creating items. It was great how you could use items you didn’t want and salvage them for materials you could use to make better items. I mean this as simply amazing. I didn’t spend a lot of time bartering, which is after all quite time consuming, and spent more time questing/PvP’ing and making my own items!

 

*Customization of armor. This is a very simple mechanism in the game but man was it a great one. I collected Blue dye so I could have a completely Blue avatar, or Red, or Yellow, or Orange, etc. This was really great.

These were a few of the things I loved. There are many more but right now I am tired and need some sleep. Please feel free to add your experiences or possibly critique mine.

My battle cry, “/a I hope you die a slow, miserable death at the end of my sword.”

To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.

---

Originally posted by Yoottos'Horg

 *NPC’s! I loved how they would attack the weaker person first. It almost never failed that they would skirt the Warrior/Whatever and attack the Monk or Elementalist. It really required a great deal of coordination with the team.

---

You musta been playing with crappy monks.

I completed all 6 PvE missions and on mission #5 & 6 I was the primary healer (monk/warrior).

I started playing on Thursday at 8:00 PM pacific and when I loged off at 11:00 PM Saturday I had earned 18 skills.

I'll be buying this game.

D. Semsem: Epic Rouge / Fighter / Weapon Master; I was just lookin' at it, . . Jeez, relax.

it's sooo true how they would attack the weaker person. I was a warrior/elementist and they always went towards the monk every time.  Even if he was shooting from the back and i got first hit they still went for the monk.  Oh well i loved the gaem very much and that was just a small portion.  I too will be buying this game

One of the best MMORPG games I've played in a long time.  I loved the idea of instant zones to prevent lag.  This game also has no level grinding.  From what I can tell from the E3 demo, there is a pretty good crafting system.  PvP and PvE makes this game great for anyone.

I'll be buying this game.

Hey, YH,

I enjoyed reading this, and am glad that you liked Guild Wars so much. I thought I'd share with you something that you mentioned, about drops. Now, I understand what you're saying when you suggest that we increase the drop rate or the amount of gold per drop. I might once have agree with you... until I played Guild Wars for two years.

There is a delicate matter in games, something that, once wrecked, can never be salvaged:  the game economy. Thinking of a game I loved (and which I played and wrote about for years), I had a real surprise when a friend said "I don't stop for anything under three figures." "Wow," thought I, "that's sort of odd, there's gold all over the ground and he's not even stoppi... " and then I got it. There was gold all over the ground and that very fact made gold pretty much meaningless.

When I leveled up my first character in that game and noticed she had no space in inventory for gold, I tweaked "Gee, maybe the way this economy is designed isn't real great after all." When the economy came to be based on a certain specific item in the game, rather than the chosen and designed gold standard I further understood that game economies are very delicate, and must be carefully attended to at all levels of the game.

I agree that drops of gold in Guild Wars are not frequent. I agree they are usually quite small, 3 or 4 gold, instead of 127. But I'll tell you this, when I see the twinkle of a drop, it matters! There is nothing in Guild Wars that is expendable; nothing in Guild Wars that doesn't matter in some way.

So while I once would have pleaded with the designers for more frequent drops, huge items of great worth, and gems flowing like spring water, I now believe that in Guild Wars they have gotten it just right. :)

Gaile Gray
Community Relations Manager
ArenaNet
www.guildwars.com & www.arena.net